The Trap

by Michael Grant

  Because that’s the kind of thing you notice.

  Risky’s lovely face was close to his. “You were about to say, ‘I’ll bet you are,’” Risky said, still very pleasant—aside from the choking-hair thing. “I hate that joke.”

  Nine Iron managed to grunt in a way that might have been “Sorry.”

  The hair snake withdrew, and Nine Iron sucked fetid oxygen.

  “You’re here to meet my mother,” Risky said.

  Nine Iron nodded and croaked the words “Pale Queen” through his crushed windpipe.

  “Follow me. But watch the jokes: Mom has, like, no sense of humor.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Do you ever find yourself in a place you never thought you’d be? A place that doesn’t seem to make any sense within the narrative of your life? And you get this kind of queasy, “whoa, life is kind of weird and unpredictable” feeling? And you start wondering if this is the start of some long spiral into complete strangeness? Even madness?

  You might expect Mack to have gotten that feeling when he was chased out of his school by Skirrit, or when he was down inside of Uluru, or maybe when he was being chased around the Donghuamen Night Market by elves on bikes.

  But for some reason the weirdness struck him now.

  He was sitting at a square wooden table that was partly covered with a white cloth. Him, Jarrah, Stefan, and Xiao. On the table were cups filled with painfully hot chocolate and plates displaying the remains of their ravaged meal.

  A few feet away was the breakfast buffet table, loaded down with bread and cold cuts and cheese and yogurt and some gravel-looking granola, and canned pineapple.

  There was a wire bowl that had contained chubby little donuts—they’d all been eaten, leaving behind a light crust of sugar crystals on all four mouths.

  They were still working on bread and butter and lingonberry jam, eating like people whose last meal had been scorpions on a stick.

  It was the dining room of a hotel in Detmold, Germany. Not exactly the weirdest place Mack had been recently. In fact, it was so very close to normal that it seemed especially strange.

  Sometimes all-out weird feels less weird than something just slightly off center.

  Anyway, they were having breakfast, cautiously sipping hot chocolate, incautiously slathering butter onto bread, and asking each other politely to pass the jam.

  Detmold was a pleasant little town with a lot of buildings in the Gothic timber-framed look you’ve seen in every movie about Martin Luther or Joan of Arc. (And surely you’ve seen a few of those.)

  Basically you imagine taking some Lincoln Logs, making a sort of loose framework for a three- or four-story building. Then you imagine using white Play-Doh to fill in all the rectangles and triangles between the logs. Slap on a high, peaked roof covered in depressing gray tiles, stick in some windows with lots of tiny frames, and you have the idea.

  Now, since this is modern Germany, not Detmold the way it was back in, oh, let’s say the fourteenth century (when people were dying from the plague and eating rats and anxiously awaiting the invention of the shower), you have to picture some shiny Mercedeses and Audis parked here and there. And some more modern buildings. In fact, mostly more modern buildings, but why confuse things?

  For Mack’s purposes, the important thing about Detmold was that the Detmoldians made a decent cup of cocoa.

  After they finished their breakfast and Mack had paid with the special Magnificent 12 credit card, he took out his phone, punched up the map, and said, “I think it’s that way,” and pointed.

  The “it” in question was the

  Externsteine. The Egge Rocks, as Grimluk had called them.

  They began to walk. It was several miles away, but the air wasn’t cold, and the sun was shrouded behind thin clouds and just barely above the horizon anyway, so it was pleasant enough walking weather. Besides, none of them could read German, so the bus stops they passed were indecipherable.

  Soon after leaving the town, however, they found themselves walking into fog. Very thick fog, in fact. It didn’t seem that sticking to the road would be too hard, but it was a bit nerve-racking because cars continued to pass by. It seemed to Mack that walking on the shoulder of the road in close to zero visibility was an excellent way to get run over by a Volkswagen.

  But there wasn’t much they could do about it. And after a while of practically feeling their way through the fog, Mack realized they hadn’t seen a car for some time.

  “Ow!” Jarrah yelled.

  Mack could barely make her out even though she was just a few feet away. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. I just walked into a sign and banged my knee.”

  Mack went toward her and now he, too, could see the sign. “Freilichtmuseum,” Mack read. “What’s that?”

  “A museum for freilichts?” Jarrah suggested.

  “So, no idea?”

  “Not a clue, mate.”

  Mack carefully typed the word into the browser on his phone. “It’s an open-air museum.”

  “Okay.”

  He checked the map app. “I think we’re off the road a little. Stefan! Xiao!”

  They managed to find one another by calling out. And now the fog was thinning just a bit. And yet it seemed colder. They were in what looked very much like a medieval village. An empty medieval village.

  “I think it’s maybe like a German Williamsburg, you know?” Mack said, squinting to read his browser. “People dress up all medieval and show you how to shoe a horse or make candles or whatever.”

  “There’s no one here,” Stefan said.

  “Actually, there are people in that hut there.” Xiao pointed. Mack saw a couple of men dressed in leather breeches and loose-fitting shirts.

  “I don’t see anyone,” Stefan said.

  Just then a man came pushing past carrying a rough-hewn cage filled with rats.

  “I hate rats,” Mack said.

  “Me, too,” Stefan agreed. “But I don’t see any rats.”

  “In that guy’s cage,” Mack said.

  “What guy?”

  Mack stopped walking. “Xiao? Jarrah? You saw the guy with the box of rats, right?”

  Both said they had. Stefan had not.

  Nor did Stefan see the woman leading a cow.

  Nor did he see the two men laboring to lift bundles of firewood into a wagon. Or the young girl carrying a baby. Or the fat old bald guy riding backward on a horse.

  In a few more seconds of increasingly perplexed and then panicky conversation, it became clear that Stefan was seeing something entirely different from what they were seeing.

  Stefan saw a completely empty, but neat and well-preserved, assemblage of old buildings—a village with a large windmill.

  The rest of them saw a scattering of lean-tos and barely standing shacks and a population of young, very dirty, rag-bedecked people with few teeth and no sense of style or standards of personal grooming.

  The young girl carrying the baby was joined by a young man—in fact he might be no older than twelve or so—leading a pair of cows.

  “You don’t see that?” Mack pressed.

  “No. No, I don’t see cows or a baby or some dude,” Stefan maintained.

  “He does not possess the enlightened puissance,” a voice said in German-accented English.

  Mack spun around and there, emerging from the fog, was a boy. He had on jeans and a denim jacket. He might have looked tough, except that he didn’t. He was painfully thin, tallish, with fine blond hair down to his shoulders. He had a soft mouth and big brown eyes. Mack thought he looked about ten years old.

  “I am Dietmar,” the boy said.

  “Good for you,” Stefan snapped. “Now what was that you called me?”

  “You do not see what they see,” Dietmar said in a low, reverential voice. “For they possess the enlightened puissance. They are of the Magnifica.”

  “And what is it you see?” Mack demanded, only slightly less hostile than Stefan. The
rats had unsettled him. That plus the feeling that maybe he was hallucinating.

  “I see what you see,” Dietmar said. “I see Gelidberry and her husband fleeing their village as the Pale Queen approaches.”

  Mack froze.

  The boy made his quick, short-duration smile. “You know his name, surely? That young man who flees?”

  Mack watched the couple with the baby and the two cows walking quickly away.

  “Grimluk,” Mack whispered.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Okay, what is this, some kind of trick?” Jarrah demanded. The notion made her angry.

  Dietmar shook his head. “This is a very old site. Long before the Freilichtmuseum was built, or the medieval village, there was an earlier village in this place. Long, long ago.”

  “Three thousand years,” Mack said.

  “Yes,” Dietmar agreed. “This is a place of power. Very few can even feel it, and only one with the enlightened puissance can see through the mist of time.”

  The fog was clearing now. Warmth returned as the sun peeked through. Now they all saw the restored village as others saw it, as an outdoor museum. Gone were the phantasms of an earlier age.

  “If you saw it, then you must be one of us,” Xiao said to Dietmar.

  “One of the Magnificent Twelve?” Dietmar nodded. “Yes. I am Dietmar Augestein.”

  He extended a hand, and Jarrah shook it. Then she made a wry face. “Might want to put a little more gristle in that handshake there, mate.”

  Dietmar didn’t seem to know what to make of that.

  For his part, Mack wasn’t quite sure what to make of this boy, or of this encounter. He had been strangely moved by the vision—hallucination, whatever it was—of Grimluk as a youth. Had Grimluk caused the apparition? Was this Grimluk reaching out to say, “See, I was young once, too, and scared”?

  “Did someone tell you to meet us?” Mack asked.

  Dietmar blushed. It was very visible because his skin was extremely pale and the blush crept up his neck like a rising tide.

  “Not a person. In my family’s schloss there are ancient rooms, down under the ground.”

  “Schloss?”

  “It’s like a castle.” He shrugged. “Perhaps you don’t believe me.”

  “You’d be amazed what we’ll believe,” Mack said.

  “This castle is not so old, but before this castle was another, and another before that, you see? Each one built atop the last. Just like this village. But if you know the way, you can find the ancient rooms. I love this, to look at ancient things.”

  “Is this a long story?” Mack interrupted.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t mean to be rude,” Mack said. “But it seems like everywhere we go, someone shows up and tries to kill us. So just tell me the quick version.”

  “I am the great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great—”

  “Quicker than that.”

  “Great-one-hundred-forty-nine-times-in-all–grandson of Grimluk and Gelidberry.” Dietmar frowned. “I don’t expect you to believe me, but you must. I know it seems incredible.”

  “Incredible? Not really,” Mack said. “Last night a giant grasshopper tried to kill me, I was smacked by an elf, attacked by a shape-shifting death princess on the Great Wall of China, and I rode here on the back of a lovesick dragon.”

  “I see,” Dietmar said.

  “You see?” Mack echoed.

  “All of this that seems so strange to you seems less strange to me,” Dietmar said. “I have long known of the enlightened puissance and its uses. When you perhaps spent your time in playing video games, I read ancient texts in forgotten languages.”

  “What exactly is the enlightened puissance? That’s something I’d actually love to know,” Mack said, weary and feeling that Dietmar was a bit pedantic. So pedantic, in fact, that he probably knew just what pedantic meant without having to look it up. (Let’s save you the trouble. Some synonyms for pedantic: precise, exact, perfectionistic, punctilious, and quibbling.)

  “The enlightened puissance is a sort of capability, a talent, you might say,” Dietmar lectured. “It is like electricity in that it powers other things: language, for example, or sight.”

  “Yeah, it’s why we can use Vargran and most people can’t,” Jarrah said.

  “Exactly,” Dietmar said. “But it is not an infinite power source. It is like a battery: if you use it too much, it weakens, and then it must be recharged.”

  Mack narrowed his eyes. He was trying to decide whether Dietmar really knew a lot or was just acting like he did. “You mean it may suddenly fade out when we need it?”

  Dietmar nodded. “Perhaps that is why there must be twelve Magnifica and not three or nine.”

  “Or five,” Stefan guessed.

  Dietmar said, “I think that’s implied.”

  “How about four?” Stefan said.

  “The enlightened puissance has a different frequency for each of us. At least that is what I believe, based on my reading.”

  “Yeah, the reading you did while we were all playing games,” Mack said.

  “Exactly,” Dietmar said, apparently not getting that Mack was being just a wee bit snarky. “We may find we each have specialties, things we can do that others of the twelve cannot.”

  “Is your superpower talking a lot?” Stefan grumbled.

  “It is a long walk from here to the Externsteine,” Dietmar said, pointedly ignoring Stefan. “Eight kilometers.” So as they walked through the outdoor museum, then out into the immaculate and manicured countryside, Mack heard the long version of Dietmar’s story, which we don’t need to inflict on ourselves right now. Suffice it to say a great deal had happened to Dietmar’s family in the last three thousand years. Lots of moving around, lots of begetting, some Huns, some Tartars, approximately eight hundred ninety-four wars, and finally up to the point where Dietmar began nosing around the sub-sub-subbasements of his family’s schloss and discovered their long, long, long history.

  Dietmar was into details—exact details—so mostly Mack zoned out and looked around. There were woods coming up on the right. Dark woods.

  “So what made you decide we would be here?” Mack asked.

  “I thought you would be at the Externsteine, actually. But when I saw the fog, and saw that it was centered on the old village, I knew you were being guided there. It is not my first vision of the old ones.” Dietmar sighed. “I know that this is the year in which the Pale Queen rises. And I believed—or maybe I only hoped—that I was to be one of the Magnificent Twelve.”

  “But why today?”

  “I have ridden my bicycle out to the Externsteine every day since I learned that I possessed the enlightened puissance and perhaps was to be part of the Magnificent Twelve. Seventy-two days. Each day I rode my bicycle before school. And then after school I would go back.”

  Just then Mack’s phone made a tinkly sound announcing a new message. He looked at the screen.

  Camaro says I must dance. (smiley face) Your golem.

  Camaro could only be Camaro Angianelli, the official bully of geeks back at Richard Gere Middle School. (Go, Fighting Pupfish!)

  Mack had never heard of making kids dance, but maybe she was tired of purple nurples, swirlies, thumbtacking, pantsing, tripping, headlocking, and good old-fashioned punching. He could easily picture Camaro forcing a geek to dance.

  More interesting to Mack was the fact that the golem had somehow been classified as a geek.

  He texted back:

  If Camaro says dance, just dance. Do your best.

  “So you felt the call of destiny,” Jarrah was saying to Dietmar.

  “Not really.”

  “You wished to honor your ancestors, Grimluk and Gelidberry?” Xiao suggested.

  Dietmar looked a little uncomfortable. As if destiny and ancestors were alien concepts. “I just believed from what I had read that the Magnificent Twelve would arise. And that they would come to the Externst
eine. Sooner or later.” He shrugged. “I simply believed I was right.”

  “Why the Externsteine? Why would Grimluk send us here?” Mack asked. But just then a big bus came rushing by.

  “Tourists,” Dietmar said. “Come to see the Externsteine. We will not be alone.”

  Mack watched the bus barrel away, then slow to turn in. He stared after it. No. No way. No way Nine Iron could have gotten on a plane and made it here this quickly.

  “Did anyone else see a green hat go flashing by on that bus?” asked Mack.

  “Xiao. You might want to go airborne and see what’s ahead,” Mack said. Then he stopped himself. “Not that I’m trying to tell you what to do.”

  Xiao gave the matter some consideration. “Since you are the first of the Magnificent Twelve, you are the elder. Like an elder brother. We should do as you say.”

  “Only as long as he doesn’t get bossy,” Jarrah said.

  “Only if he is right,” Dietmar said.

  For his part, Mack felt maybe they should have an election to decide who was in charge. But there wasn’t exactly time for that. In any case, Xiao had already transformed.

  Dietmar hadn’t seen this happen before. “This is not possible.”

  Mack and Jarrah shared a grin.

  Dietmar shook his head. “No, this is definitely not possible. Laws of physics are being violated.”

  Xiao refused to be stopped by mere laws of physics and writhed up into the sky. She was back a minute later.

  “I saw the rocks, the Externsteine. They are magnificent in a sort of crude way. I also saw the bus and people getting off. They looked like regular tourists. But there was a very old man in green.”

  “How did he get here so fast? He would have had to go straight from the Forbidden City to the airport.”

  “Private plane?” Jarrah suggested.

  “I don’t know,” Mack admitted. “I’m just saying that for a very slow guy, he gets around pretty fast.”

  “Let’s go,” Stefan said grimly. “I owe Paddy Wacky.”

  Mack fretted. “I wish I knew what we’re supposed to do when we get to these stupid rocks. I mean, this is not about fighting Nine Iron.”